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tired tonight. “As I get older,” Lois said, “I want snow more. I want a white Christmas more than a nine-year-old girl wants it.” “We still have the old runner,” Ruth Abbott said, “and it wants nothing but bells on it.” Weariness and the martini mingled ingratiatingly. When Lowell made a martini, he put together eight parts gin and one part of vermouth. He felt now like the man from the old, old times who comes out of the storm and crawls into the cave. “You remember, when I was tiny,” Fern said, “you took me out in a runner,” and Lowell looked at her with a sense of shock, the warmth of her thin voice defining something that was better in retrospect than the four years they had lived in the south of France. He drank, and wanted to put his arm around Fern, gently and warmly, but she was at the other side of the room now, hanging on Elliott’s words. He, himself, was strangely rooted by the mantelpiece, looking at the gracious old room, the two Audubon originals on the wall, the weathered mahogany furniture, the deep couch. Elliott was telling Fern about 1927, which was, to hear him, the worst winter in all time. “It’s man against his best adversary, Ferney,” he said, “which is the cold of outer space, crawling down from the icecap, and beyond it a million miles of nothing to inquire of us.” “A special question?” “Our dreams are big, and we are very small.” Lowell met his wife’s eyes, shook himself awake and began to fill the glasses. Ruth and Lois were talking lazily about nothing. “I had a Model T Ford,” Elliott went on, “which you don’t know anything about, either the fact or the folklore—and both were considerable, you may believe me—but which resolved down to the fact that when you were in trouble you threw a handful of sand in the gearbox.” “Which I never believed,” Fern said, “and anyway I drove one at the fair two years ago. You bought a bond and you drove the Ford around the circle. You only make yourself out to be a lot older than you are.”
    By dinnertime, Lowell was relaxed and comfortable for the first time that day. He realized that from the moment, Lois had told him that the Abbotts would be here tonight, he had been conscious of a feeling of guilt, a need to rationalize the six-day-old strike and absolve himself from it, to anticipate Elliott’s approach; but the conversation so casually went elsewhere that he could assure himself now of Elliott’s understanding. It had been their plan to go south for the winter, and they still intended to when the unpleasantness at the plant was finished; and he thought that somehow he ought to convey that to Elliott, in the way of pointing out tangentially how little he considered the factory and how lightly he would be rid of it now, if only he had the chance. He had drunk two large martinis, enough to unchain his thoughts; the room was warm, with a fire in the hearth to give an ancient and physical manifestation of the heat; he felt, at the moment, a great tenderness toward Lois, toward Ruth and Elliott Abbott, as well as compassion and understanding for his daughter. What did anybody know about her that they dared condemn her! In fact, he asked himself, what right had any human being to condemn another? He rose to pour the wine and then sat down again. He talked freely and easily now—of nothing of great importance, but of nothing completely inconsequential either, just pleasant, ordinary conversation, which was so rare these days. It was only after he had suggested that next year, or the year after, when things in Europe had returned to some degree of normalcy, all of them go abroad, at least two months in England and Wales and Scotland, and then perhaps four or five months on the Continent—that it occurred to him that he knew nothing about Elliott’s finances, nothing about whether or